


breathe easy (take your aim)

by plutosrose



Series: bonded [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Unvierse
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Sentinels & Guides, Brief Mentions of War-Time Violence, Lots of Touching, M/M, Sentinels & Guides are Known, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:48:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27807829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plutosrose/pseuds/plutosrose
Summary: Erksine stepped up to him and began poking and prodding him, taking his temperature, taking his blood pressure, looking in his eyes, his mouth--he said something that Steve only understood half of in German, before he drew back and smiled.“It worked.”-The serum enhances every one of Steve's senses. He needs Bucky more than ever.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers & Peggy Carter, Steve Rogers & Tony Stark
Series: bonded [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2034616
Comments: 21
Kudos: 105
Collections: Bucky Barnes Bingo 2020





	breathe easy (take your aim)

**Author's Note:**

> title from all eyes on you by smash into pieces

The last thought that Steve had before he'd been closed inside the Vita Ray machine was, 'Yeah, I definitely kept all the stupid with me.'

The needles that bore down into his arm felt like they were injecting fire into his veins, but when the machine whirred to life, it felt like his muscles were pulling themselves apart, that his nerves were knitting new patterns underneath his skin.

In the distance, he could hear people shouting to turn the machine off--no! He couldn't let that happen--he was pretty sure he said something but he wasn’t sure what--his teeth hurt so bad and he was aware of every bone in his face in a way that he'd never been before, but he couldn't let them stop. Not when he was so close--he was so close to proving that he could lay down everything he had just like every other man out there.

Just like Bucky, he thought, before his brain felt like it was full of electricity and darkness closed in. 

-

His mind was whirring when Erksine and Stark came to help him out of the machine, and Peggy, Peggy who had tried to stay by his side during the procedure, was looking at him like she’d noticed him for the first time.

It wasn’t him that she’d noticed.

“Steve,” she murmured, looking up at him, wide-eyed and concerned. 

Erksine stepped up to him and began poking and prodding him, taking his temperature, taking his blood pressure, looking in his eyes, his mouth--he said something that Steve only understood half of in German, before he drew back and smiled.

“It worked.” 

-

He was soon herded into a tiny, windowless room. He could feel each second pass. He could feel his heart pumping blood to every part of his body. He could feel his brain telling his limbs how to move. 

He heard the shots practically before they happened, the click of the trigger, the spring hammering the firing pin, the explosion before the bullet left the chamber, but as soon as he tried to get up, he collapsed. He scrambled to get to his feet, but it felt almost useless--he couldn’t just stand up, he had to think about every part of his body. He had to push himself to get up.

When he finally managed it, only getting to the door out of sheer force of will, and finally opened the door, he nearly collided with Peggy.

Peggy, in the short time that he’d known her, had always looked immaculate, dark brown hair in neat victory rolls and bright red lipstick. He still thought she looked immaculate, even though a pin in her hair had loosened, and her lipstick was smudged from worrying her lip. 

“I’m sorry Steve, I’m sorry,” she got out, before she wrapped her arms around him, and suddenly, he felt a wave of relief wash over him. The sensations in his body dulled, and he felt like he might be able to stand up without using all of his willpower to remain upright. 

“What happened to me?” he murmured into her hair. He felt a shudder go through Peggy’s body before she drew back to face him. 

“Erksine’s research--there was a chance that the procedure could make enhance your senses, make you--a sentinel,” she said, taking a deep, steadying breath. “I can feel it. When you hold me. I can feel everything you’re feeling.” Peggy’s voice trailed off, and she furrowed her brow. 

Steve raised an eyebrow. He’d heard about sentinels before, but only in the colorful comic books that Mr. McGreery sold at the newsstand down the block. “I didn’t think any of that was--real.”

“It’s not understood very well,” Peggy admitted. “But it was a key component of Erksine’s research. The serum changed your entire physicality, including your senses. But Erksine--”

When Peggy’s voice dropped off, suddenly the shots that he’d heard made sense, and he felt an ache in his chest that he had a feeling had nothing to do with the serum. 

-

Erksine had discovered that individuals with enhanced senses, or sentinels, needed guides to be focused. The intention had always been to either keep him under observation until they could be confident that he had control over his new senses, or to find him a guide that had a high enough security clearance to be associated with Project Rebirth.

But Erksine was gone now, and Peggy and the rest of the Strategic Scientific Reserve were left in a lurch about how to best handle the fact that he could now see a mile away and hear people fixing dinner in what the SSR scientists thought might be fucking Westchester. 

The easiest thing, short of sticking him in a lab in the middle of Arizona never to be seen or heard from again, was to move him between SSR facilities in Europe as the top brass tried to figure out what to do with him. 

He’d been with Peggy and Howard and the rest of their colleagues for weeks. It was so boring that there was part of him that wished that he’d stuck to collecting scrap metal in New York City.  
-

“As soon as they fix you up,” Howard told him one day when he was sitting with him in his makeshift lab, “You’re going to need to get a really cool alias. And some better shit than whatever the army will give you.” 

Steve raised an eyebrow at him. “What are you talking about?”

Howard’s eyes went wide and he held out his hands dramatically. “Captain America.”

Steve blinked at him. “ _What?_ ”

Howard’s eyes glinted mischievously, and suddenly Steve was regretting every decision that he’d made--including his decision to try to enlist for the sixth time, (which was something he was certain that Bucky would be happy about), as well as his decision to spend more than five minutes in the same room as one Howard Stark. 

“I’m going to make you a superhero,” Stark said finally, leaving the lab humming, and the only reason that Steve didn’t follow him was because he’d seen the outcome of Howard’s grand pronouncements.

He really didn’t have a good feeling about Captain America, just like he didn’t have a good feeling about flying cars. 

-

Another week passed (and thankfully it was only a week, because if Howard started talking about his plans for ‘Captain America’ again he wasn’t going to make it until the end of the war) before Peggy presented him with a book that Erksine had assembled. 

Erksine had apparently gone through army records and come up with names of people who might be compatible “guides” for him. “There should be someone here who can help,” Peggy said gently, “Abraham was very thorough in his research.” 

“That’s Bucky,” Steve murmured, pointing down at the name. “Can he help me?”

Peggy frowned. “I’m sorry, that name should have been removed. Sergeant Barnes was captured along with most of the 107th.”

Steve immediately stormed away from her--Peggy struggled to keep up as he breezed down the hall and into the meeting room.

“I need information on Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes.”

The SSR men all stared at him. “What makes you think we have that information?” one of them asked, before Peggy stood next to Steve, breathing heavily from having run after him in high heels.

“I believe we can get that for you, Steven,” Peggy said.

-

“He’s alive,” Steve said when a slim file on a facility in Italy--the Nazi science division owned it, which was about to extent of the information that the SSR had. 

“You don’t know that,” Peggy murmured, her lips drawn into a tight line.

“You don’t know that he’s not.”

Peggy’s lips were still drawn tightly together, but there was a hint of a smile on her face. “I can get you Howard--best civilian pilot there is. But he’s thirty miles behind enemy lines if he’s even still alive. You will have to go alone.”

Steve nodded solemnly. He wasn’t sure if Peggy had intended her statement as a wake-up call--but if it was, it wasn’t.

He knew Bucky was alive, and he was going to rescue him. 

-

He took one look at a metal shield prototype that Howard had left behind in his lab and grabbed it before he caught up with Peggy and Howard. 

-

His senses weren’t as bad as they’d been right after the procedure, unfocused and too loud. The errant touches from Peggy on the helicopter had helped to ground him, but now that he was in the woods by himself, they were beginning to wear off. It was getting harder to separate out the noise of the German soldiers at the base from the wildlife that was beginning to stir in the dark.

He took a deep breath. 

He crept closer, using the speed and power of his new body to throw the shield and take out the soldiers that were on patrol at the edges of the compound.

He could hear men shouting and cursing and sobbing and dying, and as he moved through the facility, opening more cell doors and letting more soldiers stream down the narrow hallways, there was a sound that got louder and louder and louder until it was practically like an air raid siren going off in his head.

-

He felt Bucky before he saw him.

He could feel leather restraints around his shoulders and his midsection, so tight that it felt like something was biting into his skin. 

His veins felt heavy. There was something that wasn’t supposed to be in them, something that made him feel dizzy. His stomach churned as he approached the room.

“Steve,” he murmured in a daze, grinning up at him with a dopey smile--worse than the time that Bucky had stayed out all night with Shelley McAllister.

“It’s okay, Buck, I’m here,” he murmured as he slung his arms around him and helped him off the table. 

Touching Bucky made him feel like a jolt had gone through his body, and Steve didn’t miss the look of alarm? on his face. 

-

The march back to camp was long, and after his radio had been crushed during the jump down from the helicopter, they hadn’t had much of a choice but to walk.

Bucky said nothing, and pointedly avoided Steve’s gaze. Whatever Bucky’d been given was wearing off, but he could still feel it. Something was there that shouldn’t have been. 

“I can tell something’s wrong.”

“It’s war.”

Steve swiveled around and glared at Bucky, men marching past them. “I felt it.”

Bucky huffed, hands fidgeting the same way that they did when he wanted to light up a cigarette and storm out of their apartment. 

“They did something to you in there. I could feel it.” That wasn’t the only thing he’d felt, but it was by far his biggest concern--and considering the fact that they had miles to go and all night, he wasn’t planning on holding back. 

Bucky’s face hardened. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” 

“Buck…” Steve reached out and put a hand on his shoulder before he could stop himself. 

“Don’t.”

But he already felt it--just one touch and Bucky was a port in the storm, calm, steady, and safe.

And yet, at the same time, he could feel the same _something_ that was working its way through Bucky’s veins. Heavy. Poisonous. Deadly. 

Steve furrowed his brow. 

Bucky cracked a smile, the same way he did when he’d been laid off at the docks and Steve had been sicker than a dog and there was no money for food, let alone medicine. 

“I’m fine, really. Just a bunch of shit crazy Nazis.” 

Steve eyed him for a moment, before he put his hand on Bucky’s shoulder again.

“You feel that?”

Bucky raised an eyebrow at him. “No.”

“You didn’t even ask what I meant,” Steve protested, and Bucky wrenched his way out of his grip. 

“Don’t need to.”

Steve took a deep breath and squeezed his eyes shut. “They hit your right knee really hard. You have a bruise, ‘bout half an inch wide.”

Bucky paused and looked back at him, squinting. “How do you know that? I’m not even...I’m not even favoring my left leg.”

And it was true, Bucky wasn’t, which just made Steve even more concerned about what had happened to him on that damned examination table. 

“The serum...it did something to my senses,” Steve explained sheepishly, “I can lift a thousand pounds now and see everything. The bruise--it healed, but I can still tell that it was there.” He wasn’t entirely sure if knowing that had to do with his senses, but he couldn’t deny that he _knew_ that just like he’d known Bucky his entire life, practically better than he’d known himself. 

Bucky tsked, though Steve could tell that he was struggling not to look amused. “I really didn’t take any stupid with me, did I?”

-

SSR doctors--not army doctors--examined Bucky. Steve had been on edge the entire time, pacing back and forth until Peggy had reached out and told him that if he didn’t stop he was going to put a hole in the floor. 

“If there’s anything wrong with them, they’ll find it,” Peggy nodded. “They all worked with Erksine. They’re some of the best doctors in the entire world.” 

That made him feel better, but he still couldn’t shake the feeling that something had happened to Bucky, because he could literally feel it in his own body. Considering the fact that he had become accustomed to understanding when he just had a cold and when he was on the verge of death, it wasn’t a hunch that he could easily ignore. 

-

“They said nothing’s wrong with me,” Bucky explained over beers in a crowded London bar a few hours later. “So nothing’s wrong with me.”

Steve hummed to himself and took another long swig of beer, though there wasn’t much of a point to it. He could feel the beer snaking its way through his body, and he could feel his body burning it up until nothing was left. 

“You don’t believe them.”

“No,” Steve murmured, shaking his head. “I can’t. I could feel it, Buck. I can feel what they did to you.”

Bucky’s lips closed around the ring of the bottle, and Steve watched him longer than he meant to. “I can _feel_ you thinking.”

“Real funny,” Steve huffed, because usually a line like this was a precursor to Bucky saying something like _Your face is going to get stuck like that_ , but when he looked directly at Bucky, he found that he was being entirely serious.

“I could feel it. I could feel everything you were feeling,” Bucky admitted, before he took another drink of beer.

Steve raised an eyebrow at him. 

“But the SSR people said that’s not...that wasn’t…” Bucky trailed off, avoiding eye contact momentarily. Steve frowned, because the Bucky that he knew didn’t usually do that unless he was fuming mad and about to storm out of their apartment for the night. 

“It’s fine,” Steve shrugged. “We don’t have to talk about it.”

Bucky nodded, before a smile slowly spread across his features. “So what’s this about you becoming a superhero?”

Steve snorted and reached over to punch Bucky in the arm. 

-

“We want to put together a unit,” Peggy said to Steve in the SSR’s meeting room. “We have some suggestions, but if you have recommendations, I’m more than willing to hear them.” 

Steve looked at the files that were pushed in front of him, before he furrowed his brow. “I need Bucky.”

“We can make an offer to Sergeant Barnes, yes,” Peggy nodded, and as Steve scanned the names, he frowned.

“What does this asterisk mean?” He tapped his finger against the little asterisks that dotted the files. 

Peggy pursed her lips together the same way that she did when Stark told her that he had a new invention to show her. “They have the opportunity to go home.”

Steve stormed off before she had a chance to finish. 

-

He threw the door to Bucky’s room open with more force than he’d intended, the door rattling violently on its hinges. Bucky didn’t look at him. 

“When the fuck were you going to tell me?” 

“Your ma wouldn’t like the mouth on you,” was the first thing Bucky said, and Steve balled his hands up by his sides.

“Don’t bring up my mother,” Steve hissed dangerously. “When the _fuck_ were you going to tell me that you could go home?”

Bucky shrugged absently, and that sent Steve’s teeth on edge. He brought his hand down on the cheap dresser--the SSR probably wouldn’t appreciate the way that he’d made a splintered hole in the wood when they were the ones paying for the rooms--and Bucky jumped.

“Jesus, Steve.”

“Is this what you do now? Keep secrets? Take the Lord’s name in vain?” It felt so stupid to bring that up, but every time Steve fought, he fought like an alleycat, spitting mad and desperate to get a swipe in somewhere.

Bucky stepped closer to him, and Steve didn’t step back. “Are you really that stupid? What possible reason could you have to stay? You can go home, Buck, what the--”

And that was when Bucky cut him off with a kiss.

It wasn’t a nice kiss, it wasn’t the halting kisses that Steve had shared with a couple of the girls that Bucky’d convinced to go out with him, and it wasn’t even like the nice kisses he’d had with Mary Gallagher before her family had packed up to move to Illinois. 

It was mean and standoffish and desperate.

But it was perfect. 

He could feel every hair on the back of Bucky’s neck under his fingertips, the way that his lips moved and adjusted, the blood that was coursing through his veins, the way that his nerves fired under his skin when he reached back and planted a kiss on his neck.

He even felt the whine, traveling up from his lungs and making his vocal chords vibrate when he tugged lightly on his skin with his teeth.

“You’re a bastard, you know that?” Bucky gasped, swatting him away from his neck, before Steve pulled him closer by the belt on his army-issued uniform and they were tumbling back into bed together.

Later, when they were curled up against each other, naked and lazy, Steve pressed a kiss against Bucky’s forehead in the way that he’d always wanted to. 

“Now I can feel you thinking,” Steve chuckled, and Bucky swatted at him.

“You’re worse than Catherine McGreery,” Bucky grumbled, which made Steve snort.  
“You really want to talk about Crazy Catherine while we’re in bed together?” Steve asked, and a few seconds later, when Bucky wrapped a hand around his cock, he got his answer. 

-

But for a while, it was good. With Bucky close by, touching him on the arm or the shoulder, it calmed him down. It focused him. He could see HYDRA bases miles ahead and not have to worry about drawing fire before they’d made a plan. 

And if the touches extended to Bucky sticking his hand down his pants on the Austrian front because they’d come across fifty of their own men bleeding out and begging for death in the snow or bodies floating in a muddy, melting lake, then that was their business and their business alone. 

Coming felt like ascending to another plane of existence, and Bucky Bucky Bucky and the grin that he’d coveted when he saw it in dance halls back home.

Well, those things belonged to him. 

-

But when Bucky died, his senses unraveled. His nerves unspooled and his mind whirred in a way that reminded him of the Vita Ray machine, all electric shocks and white lights and fiery shit, trying to parse out the difference between birdsong and SSR orders, between the crushed glass that he fell on during ops and the air that he breathed into his lungs. 

Other times, he didn’t feel anything - his existence was an empty, cavernous, dark abyss. 

-

“Allow him the dignity of his choice,” Peggy’d said as he failed at drinking himself stupid, sad and sympathetic and kind, and for a moment, he’d felt anchored again.

And he was, for a moment. But there was a storm on the horizon, and there was no way to avoid it. Instead, he offered Peggy a smile and put his hand on her arm and tried to pretend that he didn’t feel it. 

He was pretty sure Peggy felt it, although he never got the chance to ask her about it. 

-

The sky and the ocean were blindingly blue outside the plane, and the whir of the engines was deafening. 

The history books would write a lot about his last thought, but the truth was he didn't have any--the sights and sounds of the moment were so overwhelming that he went into the freezing arctic waters relieved that they'd stopped.

-

When he woke up in the future, he'd thought that he was dying.

Everything was wrong and too loud and when he ran from that tiny room suspended in time, it only got worse. There were cars honking, bright lights coming from every angle above him, and too much color--in the cars, billboards, and the buildings. This wasn't the same, he thought, and that made anxiety rise into his chest as he looked around wildly.

Large black cars skidded to a stop in front of him, and on all sides, caging him in. For a brief moment, he considered jumping over them--he was confident that he could--when a small, redhead woman stepped in front of him.

"You're okay," she murmured, and she reached out and touched his wrist the same way that Bucky had in Germany a lifetime ago. He let out a breath.

"No, I...I don't...where am I?"

"New York, 2011."

The year hit him in the chest. "I had a date," he murmured weakly, thinking of Peggy. If Peggy was alive, she had to be in her nineties now, if she was even still alive. A dizzying array of faces went through his mind--Dum Dum, Have, Morita, Dernier, Falsworth--young Rebecca Barnes with her dark curls (she'd be at least eighty)...Bucky.

Bucky.

He slumped over, and although the woman had to be at least a foot shorter than him and at least a hundred pounds lighter, she reached out and held him up with ease.

"Captain Rogers, you were in the ice for seventy years--you shouldn’t even be alive, much less capable of walking around New York City. I think you should consider coming back to headquarters with us.” 

Steve didn't trust her completely--she struck him as the sort of person who could tell him that she was saving his life right before she shot him in the chest--but he didn't seem to have much of a choice, either, if only because the world was too loud now and without Bucky there wasn't a way to fix that.

After the tests had been run and he was sitting in a windowless, gray and sterile room, the door opened and Fury, accompanied by Dr. Cho, walked in, regarding him with curiosity and wariness.

"I have a number of options here that should be suitable for you," Dr. Cho said, and Fury nodded, encouraging her forward.

“No,” Steve shook his head as a binder full of names was shoved in front of his face. “I don’t want anyone else.” 

“You need someone else,” Fury said thinly, hands clasped behind his back. “We’ve been reviewing Erksine’s research for decades, and we still have no idea what kind of effect that it might have had on your senses. Letting you walk around New York City without a Guide would be criminally irresponsible of us.” 

“Then I won’t walk around New York City,” Steve shot back. “I don’t care. I’m sure these people are all very nice. I’m sure they’re even good guides--but I don’t want anyone else. I’m not going to change my mind.” 

Fury let out a sigh, barely concealing his exasperation. “My mistake, I wasn’t told that Captain America was a stubborn motherfucker in any of the history books.”

Steve cracked a smile, despite himself. “Yeah, they tended to leave that part out I’m sure.” 

-

As stubborn as Steve was, it was infinitely possible that Nicholas J. Fury could give him a run for his money.

After Steve had announced that he didn’t want a Guide, Fury had seen to it that he was effectively locked inside SHIELD’s facility. 

Inside SHIELD he was allowed to wander around relatively freely, and he’d discovered about a day after being shown to his quarters that in the future, there were lots of little electronic devices--some of which Howard had probably only imagined in his wildest dreams--that could be used to follow someone and track their movements. 

He’d ripped one out from under his couch after he’d heard something beeping--then he’d ripped through the wall in the kitchen with his bare hands when he’d felt one staring at him.

But every time he removed them, more just seemed to pop up. Fury didn’t seem to have a problem with sending people to repair areas in his quarters every day either--Steve had to wonder if this was his way of getting him to accept a new Guide. 

And maybe it was completely ridiculous and stubborn to insist that if he couldn’t have Bucky, then he wanted no one. Bucky was gone, and there had to be plenty of compatible Guides out there--Natasha, for example, seemed like she might be compatible. He didn’t hate Natasha.

She just wasn’t Bucky.

Steve had gotten in the habit of wandering down to SHIELD’s lab space to see if Tony was there. He didn’t exactly have clearance to get in, but whenever Tony spotted him, he’d let him come in. He wasn’t entirely sure what Tony did for SHIELD, but at any rate, the fact that Tony was Howard’s son made him feel slightly more at ease--even if Howard’s inventions had had an unfortunate habit of exploding that still made him feel slightly skittish, even all these years later.

“How’s my favorite Capsicle?”

Steve wrinkled his nose as he spun back and forth on the chair that Tony had pushed over to him. “I told you to call me Steve.”

Tony shrugged and went back to sticking a screwdriver in a robotic arm that whirred and moved side to side. Steve didn’t really understand what it was that Tony did for SHIELD. “Doesn’t really answer my question.” 

“Still under house arrest, basically,” Steve shrugged. 

Tony put the screwdriver down for a moment, and the robotic arm continued to move. “You don’t want someone who can help you defrost?”

The look that Steve gave him verged on murderous--and Tony held up his hands in defense. “Okay, okay. But there has to be someone who can help you. I can’t imagine it would be very fun to be stuck in here.” Tony made a face. “I’d almost rather be back in that cave in Afghanistan to be honest.” 

“No, it’s not fun, but it not being fun isn’t the point,” Steve huffed, folding his arms over the chair so that he could rest his head. “The point is--”

“Sergeant Barnes?”

Steve raised an eyebrow, and Tony turned and picked up the screwdriver--presumably, Steve thought, so that he didn’t have to look him directly in the eye. “Dad, when he was around, talked about you a lot. Barnes’s name might have come up once or twice. He never--but I was a teenager in the 80s and not exactly dumb.”

The fact that Tony didn’t take the opportunity to point out that he was a genius struck Steve as oddly genuine. 

“I’ve done some research into guides. There’s been a lot of scientific advancements since you were last awake, Cap,” Tony reached over his work station for a cloth to wipe off his hands. “You see, sentinels are pretty rare. They were rare when you got the serum, and they’re still rare now. Guides are a bit more common. Occasionally, very, very occasionally, when they bond, well...”

Steve raised an eyebrow. “What are you saying?” 

For a moment, Tony hesitated--and in the short time that Steve had known him, he didn’t seem like someone who would hesitate, ever. “If they bond, and I should tell you that wow, there is like barely any information on bonded sentinels and guides, I can’t believe you were alive when the internet wasn’t a thing.”

Steve gave Tony a sharp look. Sentinels and guides had sounded more like something out of science fiction, even if he had plenty of evidence now to know they were real--but bonds sounded like something else entirely. “What are you talking about?” 

Tony eyed him curiously for a moment, before he decided to keep going--perhaps Tony realized just how serious he was.

“Bonds aren’t well understood. Someone who doesn’t have advanced knowledge of biochemistry like you might be inclined to think of them as ‘soulmates’.’ A sentinel, for example, is much more focused with a bonded guide, and their senses are even sharper than normal.”

Steve narrowed his eyes. “I swear to God Tony, if you don’t get to the point right now--”

Tony waved him off. “But anyway, what I did find out was that if one of them dies, they both die. So this either means one of two things, one, you and Barnes were never bonded. Or...”

Steve bolted out of the room before Tony could finish.


End file.
